1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to the field of electronic mail processing and more particularly to a method and apparatus for regenerating electronic mail.
2. Background Art
Electronic mail messaging (email) is the prime means of communication used to provide customer service support by most Internet based businesses. Customers use email to request information from (or deliver information to) the company's customer service representatives (CSR). Email is also used by the company's electronic systems to communicate without human intervention with customers. Companies that use electronic mail (email) to provide customer service usually need to keep a historical log of all the correspondence between the company's online system and the customers. Such correspondences must be stored in a manageable way so as to enable any entity representative (e.g. a customer service representative) to find information in the historical data.
FIG. 1a illustrates the basics of email communication with a client. Customer 100 carries out all email communication through Internet 110. On the company side, an email server processes the inbound email communications. In some instances, past correspondence is needed to assist customers with specific requests. Current systems provide for company personnel to obtain such correspondence by storing each and every email message sent to or received from a customer. Each email message is copied from the server to an email management system 130 attached to a storage device 140.
Storing copies of all email messages and processing them to manage the information is a burdensome task and presents many drawbacks. Historical storage takes up considerable space, whether online or in hard copy, and it is often difficult to retrieve the exact information, in a timely manner as required for a particular customer.
Information must be drawn from stored email messages, which necessitates parsing the stored email messages and finding cues, such as users email addresses and subject contents, in order to sort and group correspondences by topics. This approach is error prone, since customers may use different email addresses to communicate about any given topic, or use different subject content when corresponding about the same topic. To improve the parsing accuracy, a commonly used technique is the use of unique identifiers. Unique identifiers are, for example, numbers attached to each new email message. By keeping the same number in all subsequent emails, it is possible to track a posteriori all related email messages. This method is still prone to inaccuracies; since customers may use same unique numbers for different topics, for example if the customer uses the “reply” functionality, present in many modern email clients, the subject line will include the content of the subject, including any unique identifier.
In addition to shortcomings in parsing email messages, storing a big volume of data is costly in terms of hardware storage media, and in terms of search and processing time. Thus, there is a need for a system that overcomes the limitations of current system by providing for efficient storage and processing of electronic mail data. For example, the is a need for a system that provides a way to regenerate electronic message data without having to store each and every message that is transmitted.